Indiscreet Letters From Peking | Page 9

moment, and though you do not dare to speak your thoughts to your neighbour, these thoughts are talking busily to you without a second's interruption. For if this storm truly comes, it must sweep everything before it and blot us all out in a horrible way. Our servants tell us so.
These servants of polite Peking society are favoured mortals, for they one and all are of the Eight Banners, direct descendants of the Manchu conquerors of China. And, strangely enough, although they are thus directly tied to the Manchu dynasty, and that some of them may be even Red Girdles or lineal descendants of collateral branches of the Imperial house, they are still more tightly tied to the foreigner because they are Roman Catholic dating from the early days of Verbiest and Schall, when the Jesuits were all supreme. On Sundays and feast days they all proceed to the Vicar Apostolic's own northern cathedral, and witness the Elevation of the Host to the discordant and strange sound of Chinese firecrackers, a curious accompaniment, indeed, permitted only by Catholic complacency. This they love more than the Throne.
Your Bannerman servant is now the medium of bringing in countless rumours which he barefacedly alleges are facts, and in impressing on you that everyone must certainly die unless we quickly act. The three Roman Catholic Cathedrals of Peking, placed at three points of the compass, are almost strategic centres surrounded by whole lanes and districts of Catholics captured to the tenets of Christ, or that portion deemed sufficient for yellow men, in ages gone by. Every household of these people during the past few weeks has seen fellow-religionists from the country places running in sorely distressed in body and mind, and but ill-equipped in money and means for this impromptu escape to the capital which everyone vainly hopes generally is to be a sanctuary. The refugees, it is true, do not receive all the sympathy they expect, for the Peking Catholic being the oldest and most mature in the eighteen provinces of China, holds his head very high, and "new people"--that is, those whose families have only been baptized, let us say, during the nineteenth century--are somewhat disdained. In a word, the Peking cathedrals and their Manchu and other adherents are the Blacks; and not even in papal Rome could this aristocracy in religion be excelled. But although the newcomers are disdained, their news is not. Everything they say is believed. The servants, therefore, browsing rumours wherever they go, bring back a curious hotchpotch after each separate excursion. Sometimes the balance swings this way, sometimes that; sometimes it is ominously black, sometimes only cloudy. You never know what it will be ten minutes hence, and you must content yourself as best you can. Your body-servant being a Bannerman (my particular one is a Manchu), and being reasonably young, is also a reservist of the Peking Field Force, and consorts with other Bannermen who may be actually on guard at one of the Palace gates. Who passes in and who passes out of the Palace now spreads like wildfire round the whole city, for the success of the Boxers will depend upon the support the Peking Government intends to give them when the worst comes to the worst. And the Peking Government is still fencing, because the Palace cannot make up its mind whether the time has really come when it must act. This lack of decision is fatal.
Late in the afternoon it transpired that the Empress Dowager was not in the Imperial city at all, but out at the Summer Palace on the Wan-shou-shan--the hills of ten thousand ages, as these are poetically called. Tung Fu-hsiang, whose ruffianly Kansu braves were marched out of the Chinese city--that is the outer ring of Peking--two nights before the Legation Guards came in, is also with the Empress, for his cavalry banners, made of black and blue velvet, with blood-red characters splashed splendidly across them, have been seen planted at the foot of the hills. Tung Fu-hsiang is an invincible one, who stamped out the Kansu rebellion a few years ago with such fierceness that his name strikes terror to-day into every Chinese heart. As for P'i Hsiao-li--the false eunuch--he is everywhere, they say, sometimes here, sometimes there, and quite defying search. The eunuch has a mighty fortune at stake, and all natives believe that he will betray himself. Half the pawnshops and banks of Peking belong to him, and he will not sacrifice his thirty million taels until he is convinced that his head is at stake. The Summer Palace lies but a dozen miles beyond Peking's embattled walls, and from the top, straining your eyes to the west, you can vaguely see the Empress's plaisaunce. A journey in and out is nothing by cart, and